Alvaro Fuerte
Prof. Kim Liao
English 1121
February 14, 2019
I am no writer nor a reader, I certainly I am no skillful English speaker. I cannot talk much about the language other than my own experiences and what I did to learn it, how those things helped me shape a not so broken English.
I lived my entire life in Mexico, never really cared to learn another language whether it was English or any other. I always wanted to speak English just so that I could understand some of my favorite songs, movies or TV shows, but never really to be able to have a full conversation with someone. Although I wanted to learn I never did anything to really be able to do so. The only time I would anything related to language learning was in school and unfortunately it would not stick with me for very long.
When I first arrived to the U.S. I knew this was my chance to learn the language that I knew could open a lot of doors to my own good. My dad took me to the district where they tested my very poor English since all I knew how to say was the basic stuff, “Hello my name is Alvaro and I am from Mexico” or “I am fourth teen years old” and of course some colors and other simple phrases. The man who was with us did his best to understand my dad’s broken English, as well as he did to explain to me in Spanish what my situation was looking like and what were the high schools I had to check out and choose from, all international HS.
This high school was supposed to help me not only on my academics but it would do a lot more for my English, the problem was that being an international high school there were hundreds of Spanish speakers students. This made learning the language two times more difficult than it already is. How could I learn fast enough to understand what my teachers where saying? I remember my first day of school I got home from school and went directly to buy a small book. What for? If I did not understand most of the words on it. Well, I would read a phrase multiple times and see what words I could recognize or understand and then translate the rest of the words and try to put them all together as they did better sense. After, I would translate the entire phrase to double check, most of the time I was right.
Part of knowing a language is to being able to speak it and pronounce it as best you can. To help me with this part of the process I would pick very slow songs and do with the lyrics the same as I did with the book. Then, listen to the song for hours and carefully listen how the singer would pronounce the words and try to imitate them as best as I could. In school not only did I have to communicate with the school staff but I also had grades to take care of, therefore I had class work, homework, and other types of projects that needed to be done by someone who was just recently trying to learn the language.
Wrote down ideas in Spanish, put those ideas in a proper sentences, translate word by word, put the sentence together, and checked on the books to make sure it was somewhat consistent, that is how my freshman of high school year looked like. Of course the more I practiced and repeated this approach, the more my English improved, and even though at some point of the beginning of soft more year I did not need go through so much trouble to write a sentence I would still do it every once in a while just to double check.
Eleventh grade had come to haunt me, “This is the most important year of all four, and this is what colleges look to,” all of my teachers said. I wanted to improve my writing skills, and even though I was ahead of most of the class on writing, reading, and speaking I was completely terrified. As most of the kids on the U.S. I read the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, novel about a young girl in 1936, telling different stories about the racial conflicts at the time and how it affected their lives. This novel hit me in the face when I least expected it, and in the way less wanting way, it made realize that I had to learn the different variations of English there is since throughout my journey of becoming the professional I aspire to be there will be uncountable occasions where I will not have all those easy texts I used in my starting years. With the help of my English teacher from back when I was in the ninth and tenth grade, I was able to understand what the book was trying to say, how people used to speak back then and how modern generations have manipulated words or phrases to use them in totally different contexts, and how can a word that was used a hundred years ago with a very disturbing meaning was now used in a daily basis.
Thanks to my teacher I was able to understand a little bit better how the English language works and how I has or can be manipulated. I am still learning this language, every day I learn something new about it, a new technique, a new word, or even a new form of writing it down, but it’s really refreshing that I will keep on adding to my knowledge to write down my way out of college.
